With dozens of life commitments appearing each day, spending quality time with your family seems like a challenge. Sure, you strive to earn more money to make your children’s lives more comfortable, but that shouldn’t be your only goal.
Each day you get home stressed, tired, and even angry, and your family feels all those negative emotions coming from you. If you’re worried about the effects of not spending time with family, read on.
Contents
1. Children Feel Emotionally Distressed
If your children see you only in the morning – or don’t see you at all during the work week – they may begin to feel emotionally distressed and depressed.
Your children might see other parents playing with their kids and think that you don’t love them. These feelings can also depend on your children’s age.
If your child is under 9, they might feel guilty and sad, believing they’ve done something wrong as their parents don’t want to spend time with them.
If your child is older, they might start thinking that you just don’t care about their feelings and emotions.
As a result, you break your children’s trust and love by choosing your busy life. Of course, you have to work to make a living. However, ensure your little ones feel that they are your priorities.
Otherwise, it will be hard to restore your parent-child relationship.
You can do this by spending time with them and consistently making them feel that they are not disposable. Sometimes, we get too tired from work and avoid taking care of our responsibilities.
We become ill-tempered and are easily annoyed when a child asks a very simple, innocent question. Practice extending your patience to build better relationships with your children.
2. Risky Behavior
Children want to be heard and loved. You definitely love them, yet it’s not enough to keep your family bond strong. When was the last time you listened to your child instead of saying, “I can’t right now, I’m busy”?
Children, especially younger kids, engage in lots of risky activities when their parents are at work. Risky behavior is just a way to grab your attention and spend some time with you.
Suicide also often happens in families where parents work hard and spend little to no time with their children. Of course, you don’t have to leave your job.
If you’ve noticed that your child’s behavior has changed, remember it’s your child’s way to show you that they lack your attention, love, and presence.
Thus, ask them questions every day. A simple act of asking about their day will make them happy, and you will notice that they become more open and forgiving.
Take baby steps, and always be alert for sudden behavioral changes.
3. Weakened Family Bond
It’s so hard to build a strong family bond, but it’s so easy to break it. Not spending enough time with your family can lead to a weak family bond.
Not only will you have communication issues with your little ones, but you can also have trouble with your spouse.
Strong family bonds can stop kids from having issues with drugs as well. When it’s lost, there’s no trust, understanding, and love between family members.
Even if your kids don’t have drug issues or behavior problems, they can grow up with low self-esteem and a poor understanding of what a happy family and love are.
If you want to create a bond with your kids, at a young age, you can take them to the park for a fun playtime session or take them out for ice cream. At some point in their lives, they need to be given much attention so that they can fully develop in their formative years.
Don’t take this for granted.
4. Poor School Performance
There are lots of reasons why children underperform at school or college, such as specific learning disabilities, below-average intelligence, health issues, etc. But still, a poor home environment remains a leading reason.
Children of parents who fight all the time and those who are busy all the time show similar poor school performance. When parents are involved in children’s lives each day, kids tend to study better.
Even 20 minutes of quality time at the end of the day can significantly improve your children’s grades.
It doesn’t have to be all work, either. Try to engage in some fun activities with your children.
Find a way to make learning fun for your kids. You can do this by giving them a prize at the end of a game or after challenging them every semester.
This way, your kids know that effort is necessary if you want to have the best things in life.
5. Poor Resilience
Do you teach your children how to deal with emotional, social, behavioral, educational, and physical hardships?
Busy parents aren’t responsive during a time of children’s needs. That’s why children of busy parents often have poor resilience and have difficulty handling negative emotions.
Moreover, these children can be the subjects of bullying. Asking, “How was your day?” isn’t enough. Dedicate at least 15 minutes to find out which hardships your children have, and let them know how they can cope with those problems.
Support is crucial these days. When a child doesn’t feel a parent’s support, they start believing they’re alone in this world and no one cares about their problems. When such a child grows up, they become either depressive or aggressive.
6. Aggression
We often wonder how seemingly perfect families can have aggressive kids. The problem usually lies in not spending enough time with family.
Researchers have found that poor parenting during infancy leads to childhood aggression. Teens have increased levels of anger when they don’t spend enough quality time with their parents.
They feel lonely and so turn into a defender who protects themselves in a variety of ways, including aggression.
7. Depression
Nowadays, more and more children, especially teens, are diagnosed with depression.
A depressive child has trouble connecting with other children and adults, has poor concentration and school performance, and doesn’t enjoy doing normal daily activities.
Busy parents might not notice the first symptoms of depression and it can have a range of negative consequences, including suicide.
The majority of parents wonder why their kids are unhappy and why they’ve been diagnosed with depression. They work hard to provide everything their kids need and don’t see smiles or excitement on their little faces.
Believe it or not, spending quality time with your family can alleviate most of the depression symptoms.
In some cases, children of busy parents experience severe forms of antisocial behavior, including adult crime and unemployment. Domestic violence is also to blame.
If you and your spouse are too busy with your relationship issues to spend time with your kids, antisocial behavior is more likely to happen in the future.
Regardless of your children’s ages, try to spend as much quality time with them as possible. Even if you’re super busy, you can still make an effort to improve.
For instance, you can invite your kids and spouse to the kitchen and cook a meal together or you can cook while listening and talking to them. Try to eat together at least once per day, be it dinner or breakfast.
When cleaning the house or going grocery shopping, you can involve your little ones as well. Such small changes in your family will make a major positive impact on your family.
